This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 15 episode of "All In with Chris Hayes."
Eight decades ago, the United States joined an alliance of nations in a world war to defeat fascism. Millions of Americans fought and sacrificed for that war, including the father and mother of retired Gen. Mark Milley. In 2019, Milley would become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top-ranking general in the U.S. military.
Decades after his parents’ service, Milley is offering a stark warning that fascism is taking hold again, not in Germany or Italy but here in America. According to Milley, as reported by journalist Bob Woodward in his forthcoming book, the biggest threat to democracy and safety in the nation is its 45th president and the same man who wants to be the 47th president: Donald Trump:
He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country…A fascist to the core!’ Milley repeated to me. I will never forget the intensity of his worry.
Less than three weeks out from Election Day, the former top general is warning America that it could elect a fascist to be president. And he’s right: Trump is running a straightforwardly fascist campaign.
It’s becoming harder to ignore, as threats of violence and racism become a central feature of his rhetoric and his rallies. It was on full display this week when Trump chose to hold a key rally not in a battleground state, but in the heart of blue Colorado, in the Denver suburb of Aurora.
Aurora is where, for weeks, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, have pushed a fake narrative that the city is paralyzed by gangs of migrants. To be clear: It’s a bigoted lie. Every bit as false and racist as Trump’s claims about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. And just like they did in Springfield, local Republicans, including Aurora's Republican mayor, are calling out Trump’s lies.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his campaign from using the city to make their disgusting, dishonest argument, claiming America is “under occupation” and needs “liberating.” At the rally, Trump turned the fascism up to 11, amplifying the racist hatred of migrants and vowing to mobilize the federal government to use violence against them.
If you think that you’re safe because you’re not a migrant and that Trump would never use that power against you, think again.
“Kamala has imported an army of illegal aliens and gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World,” Trump falsely claimed. “I’m announcing today that upon taking office, we will have an Operation Aurora at the federal level to expedite the removal of these savage gangs. And I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”
Yes, the Alien Enemies Act. Trump is promising to “round up” migrants using a law passed under John Adams, which was designed to allow the president to arrest, detain and deport "aliens" from any country at war with the United States.
It was invoked by Woodrow Wilson to throw Germans out of the country in World War I and led to the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It is a disgusting stain on the history of American pluralistic democracy and Trump wants to use it to round people up on American streets.
And if you think that you’re safe because you’re not a migrant and that Trump would never use that power against you, think again:
“I think the bigger problem are the people from within,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics ... and it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military because they can’t let that happen.”
The textbook fascist idea is that if you resist, you, your neighbors and your family could be classified as domestic enemies of the state, more dangerous than a foreign adversary. This is the campaign Trump is running for president. The only way it could be more fascist is if it painted Democrats as unworthy moral degenerates.
Oh, wait. The Trump campaign is doing exactly that, running wall-to-wall ads in the swing states accusing Harris of supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens,” and telling Americans, “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Trump is running that ad because he believes fear and bigotry will win them the election.
This is a fascist campaign: It’s a war on truth and on the people who tell truths. It promises a violent ultimate victory over every perceived enemy of Trump — using the power of the state and invoking the voice of the people.
And he’s running neck and neck in the polls with the sitting Democratic vice president. Why is that?
For one thing, after decades of far-right media programming, a lot of Americans are primed for an authoritarian leader. Some portion of the country just affirmatively likes the strongman pitch. Of course, it rarely works out for them in the long run. Survivors of fascist regimes stand as evidence that no supporter is safe from the regime they boost.
But the second and critical advantage that fascism has in America today is that the press still doesn’t know how to fully communicate the perilousness of our situation — in part because Trump is the world’s most famous liar. He’s such a liar that even many of his biggest supporters simply think he’ll never do the things he says. As one Republican pollster told The New York Times this week, “The normal rules just don’t apply to Donald Trump, and you’ve seen it time and again.”
This is a fascist campaign: It’s a war on truth and on the people who tell truths.
That pollster said that his polling and focus groups indicated that “people think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.”
But the question of whether you should take Trump seriously or not got a definitive answer in his last weeks in office, as he desperately attempted to cling to power.
In the lead-up to that election, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote that “there would be no Trump coup,” adding that Trump was “a noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat.”
Trump’s former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wrote that, “If Trump loses, he will concede gracefully … He’ll fight hard to make sure the results are fair, and in the end he’ll accept the result whatever it is.”
We now know just how deadly wrong those assumptions were. Yet, even as Trump ratchets up the fascist rhetoric, we’re memory-holing what he did as president and living in denial of what he would do if he became president again.